Foundations 9 Hope: Private Hope, Collective Hope and Institutional Hope

Hope: Private Hope, Collective Hope and Institutional Hope

At the heart of every hope process struggling to widen its appeal is the ‘private hope’ of an individual person such as ourselves. (V Braithwaite)

The previous four sections— Mimesis and Relationships, Relationships and Change, Reconciliation, and Reconstructive Education—underpin the practice of Nurturing Hope. While understanding that hope is essential to our personal well-being, we now also understand that it is a core outcome associated with the governance and culture of trusted civic and public institutions. In this section we will explore the relationship between private hope, collective hope, and institutional hope. Our explorations are informed by earlier research into restorative practicesxliii and through the work of Valerie Braithwaite and colleagues on institutional hopexliv.

Daring to Hope: Hope and Existence

At the heart of every hope process struggling to widen its appeal is the ‘private hope’ of an individual person such as ourselvesxlv. Hope has two meanings, one old and one new.

• The older one is that we can choose to rely on something. We are certain that we are safe in the knowledge that it exists. We receive this knowledge through our experiences of, with and from others.

• The newer meaning is that we wish for something for the future. Hoping in adversity reminds us that hope is central to our being. To hope in the face of adversity is to carry within and between us the knowledge of possibility. Our current reality is not the whole of reality. Hope is a deep conviction in each of us that we have not been abandoned. We have not been defeated and left alone. We walk on in the knowledge, and with the support of those with whom we have—or have had—open and trusting relationships. Hope gives us a sense of possibility. With a sense of possibility, we can bring something out of nothing. Defeat may be an obstacle, but it is not the reality. Among the many experiences that are the roots of the Nurturing Hope materials is the life of Ray Davey. Ray was the founder of the Corrymeela Community of Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. He was profoundly shaped by his experience from 1942-

1945 as a World War II prisoner of war

in North Africa, Italy and Dresden. While in a prison camp near Dresden, Germany, he lived through the British-American aerial carpet bombing of the city. Over three nights 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices were dropped on the city, resulting in a firestorm that destroyed more than

1,600 acres and in which almost 25,000 people were killed.xlvi For Ray, he lived through the “end of the world” as he knew it. A British officer, he witnessed this mass destruction by US and UK forces as a member of ‘the good side, the side who were right’. The possibility of changing the world for good by violence came to an end for Ray on that night.xlvii In his commitment to bring about a better world, but without violence, the questions of where to find and how to live in hope with, and for, people on all sides became central for him. How could people move beyond distrust, enmity, and violence? Ray believed that people would only be able to live together if they found and celebrated the hope offered by reconciliation—one which would sustain them when they thought they were losing and move them past adversity.xlviii Many years later, Ray returned to Dresden to meet some of his former captors in an act of reconciliation between the UK and Germany. He often spoke of his survival being dependent on having a hope outside of himself and his situation. Importantly for many of us, Ray demonstrated how private expressions of hope could become hope for others. The horror of Nazism, and the possibility of triumphing over it by violence, left Ray with the conviction that hope lay outside military or political victory. The crises of now have not become any less pressing and violence still offers no solutions. We ‘dare to hope’ in the midst of a world dominated by so many people forced from their homes and seeking sanctuary, regularly facing hostility and racial discrimination or merely trying to survive. These materials are rooted in a refusal by many individuals in conflicted societies to give up hope. To have hope is not to be naïve. It is to know, in our deepest being, that our hope lies in our experiences of healing and wholeness and that these will carry us through periods of injury and alienation. Even when the difficulties of life press in on us, to have hope is to be mimetic with another reality.xlix In situations that appear almost impossible, we ‘are carried’ by relationships of possibility, such as the reality of Ray Davey in his POW camp. These mimetic realities remind us that change and growth are possible and that damaged and damaging relationships can still be transformed. To walk in hope is an act of faith, not force. It is to live in the world ‘as if’ another world already exists and is possible. Vaclav Havel, the dramatist and dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia, who was later elected as the country’s first post-Communist president, urged his fellow citizens to resist the all-powerful state. Act as if the communist state does not exist, and it will not. This absurdist approach, he observed, is the power of the powerless.l The essential core of life for people of faith is to live practical lives animated by hope. In this new world, hope and faith are not objects of power to be used over and against others, but fundamental human realities which can be shared—even if we each use other language to spread them. Humanitarians, like

those who volunteer with Doctors without Borders (MSF), remind us to ‘dare to hope’ against all odds. Since 1965 in Northern Ireland, we have experienced many instances of people who ‘hoped against hope’. The residential meeting place, Corrymeela, that Ray Davey founded became, and still is, a place which gathered and gathers people together, often sharing their fears in safety and celebrating their hopes so that they could spread.

• When their relatives were killed in the conflict Maura and Edmund Kiely, Mary Gregory and their fellow survivors founded the Cross Groupli, a group for anyone who had lost a close relative. They refused to have the deaths of their spouses and children be made the possession of any one ‘side’.

• Peter Tennant, a Friends Ambulance Unit stretcher bearer in the Sino-Japanese war, later worked to re-unite Jewish children with any remaining relatives. Then, at age 65, he had the tenacity to volunteer at Corrymeela for 15 years plus!

In Northern Ireland there are many beacons of hope amid extreme diversity:

• Alan McBride would not give into despair after the killing of his wife in a bombing. He continued to meet people in paramilitary groups and political parties and make the case for ending violence and supporting victims and survivors.

• In the wake of the murder of her son Sean, Hylda Armstrong lived out her hope for a society free of hatred, expressing this in opening a playground at the Corrymeela Centre dedicated to the memory of Sean and in working to establish Mill Strand, a new Integrated School open to people from every background.

Growing Up with Personal Hope? Having Hope Placed in Us

To have hope is central to our human condition. It is always something that we are given or receive from others. No matter what is happening on the surface, it is something that we can rely on to carry us along. It is grounded in the knowledge that something else is possible. Hope is often confused with optimism. They are not the same. Hope is a reality that lives in and with us, even in the most pessimistic of times. Optimism is dependent on things working out well, on us ‘winning’ or ‘getting what we want’. As Thomas Aquinas argued, ‘hope is directed to a future good which is hard but not impossible to attain’.lii

Beginning at birth, hope is placed in us through significant relationships. Human life is life in relationships. Indeed, the relationships are so many and so complicated that we cannot know precisely how many. There are relationships that come to us through others and across generations, like our grandparents who themselves were shaped by others who, in turn, were also shaped by others. Nothing in human life is experienced outside of relationships. We are not fully autonomous and none of us is an island. The course and quality of our lives also depend on our relationships. Our feelings are all connected to, and arise from, our relationships. Through our relationships, we experience both the good and the bad, belonging and separation, trust and unease, openness to others, and rivalry with them. To be healthy as a person, therefore, means that we live in healthy relationships. The only antidote to a relationship which crushes us or frightens us, is another relationship which frees us. To hope means to carry with us the realities which arise from relationships where we are not rivals. Even if we have only one relationship of hope, we have the possibility to find the space and freedom we need to not join in with the rivalry occurring around us. When we live in hope, we stay free of the fears and threats around us, and act from that place in our lives. Hope is a reality found in and amongst our relationships. It is not a possession or object but a dynamic reality that we receive from and share with one another. It is, quite literally, a way of life. Victoria McGeer, a professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University in Canada, even believes that ‘to live without hope is not to live a human life’. liii Within this ‘mimetic’ understanding, hope keeps us free of the chaos around us by grounding us in relationships which keep us afloat. With this foundation, we act in response to the hope we already carry, not in reaction to what is going on around us. Put another way, when we meet with others who give us hope, we are rescued from the despair that rivalry, chaos, and violence can create. In relationships that promote hope, we can become hopeful ourselves and also be agents of hope for others. We, too, can bring a new reality into the midst of chaos, a reality of openness and trust. We can become, in the language of the COVID-19 pandemic, a super- spreader of hope. If in childhood we experienced open and accepting relationships with our parents, carers, and siblings, without knowing it, we learned to trust. Trust simply was a fact for us—and it gave us a place from which to learn in freedom from others. Mimetically, we grew our own capabilities, acquired skills, and flowered as unique human beings. As we grew up, learning from the challenges we overcame and the disappointments we put behind us, parent/carer relationships that nurtured us as children have been the incubator of hope. They enabled us to live in hope in our own right, they prepared us to be “hope-full”. Of course, some of us do not recognize this experience, and

for some of us it was only ever a small part of our story. For us, hope may have arrived in the small opportunities that came our way to choose the direction we wished to take or in experiences of succeeding against all odds. Or, at some point in our lives, we came into relationships or structures that gave us our place, places without rivalry where we were welcomed. In mimetic terms, these choices left a hope in us that gave us freedom at certain times to choose new paths outside the mimetic madness in which we found ourselves.

Hope and Clear Thinking

Hope shapes how we make our way forward together. Hope enables us to set goals, make plans and embrace future actions. To live in hope means to live lives shaped by a deep ‘knowing’—mimetically, when we are not cognitively conscious of it—that we have our place. It is to know that we are loved. Now, we can see ways in which to act that were not visible to us when our energies were directed to defeating our enemies. For hope to appear in the world, it is essential for us to be in, come into, or come back to relationships that are open and free of rivalry. Many of our cultural, social or political dynamics are full of rivalry. The risk is that we will drown in, or get swept up in, this rivalry as soon as we engage with it. Through the Nurturing Hope materials, we hope that we can begin to see more clearly how these dynamics work. In seeing them and the impact they have on us—anxiety, depression, dread of losing- we have the possibility of choosing to live in, and with, hope. When we move in relational, cultural, and societal dynamics marked by openness and trust, we finally get the space—free of rivalry—to think more clearly without having to consider winning or losing. We arrive at this space through other people, in that world, who act out of a deeper hope. We do not simply repeat the patterns and dynamics of rivalry but now act in response to hope.

Hope Grows Between Us—Hope Is Infectious

Hope is an experience shared between people; hope is transferred from one context to another. Freedom, like desire, is mimetic. We become free in the presence of others who are free and vice versa. We become free when we come into places in which we can be open and can trust. In trust, our fears ‘disappear’; they are no longer prominent or dominate us. It is our experience that ‘’communities of learning”, where we can trust and are trusted, can be places where we begin to find and see that other ways are possible. Hope, too, is mimetic and contagious. As hope grows between and amongst people, it spreads and spawns new ways forward for everyone. Hope multiplies when it meets hope. Relationships that maintain hope nourish, and are nourished by, the hope of others. We need each other to keep our hope. As complicated human beings experiencing many relationships we may easily return to our fears, our anxieties, and our anger or depression. However the fact also remains that we can always be changed for the good in relationships of trust.

Hope moves. It spreads contagiously across different situations as it lives in us and in the people around us. Hope is brought to life through sharing examples of change in our lives, or elsewhere. To live in hope is to ‘carry’ the mimetic imprint of relationships that gave us hope. It always has to do with the experience of being carried either through experiences in our lives or by and with those around us. We do not hope for anything. Rather we live in hope and it changes the things that we do. Hope is mimetic of time (the past) and space (the present). Hope allows us to take steps into the future without spreading the fears and rivalries that normally accompany us. Nurturing hope requires us to avoid the pitfalls of wishful or simple thinking. This kind of hope—hoping to win, hoping to get a Christmas present—is ‘cheap hope’. It is the romantic illusion that things always work out, or that we are not part of the mimetic crises of the world. Paradoxically, hope is often at its most ‘hope-full’ when things seem pessimistic. It is a conviction, a ‘rock’ born sometimes out of only very small experiences that there is more to life than violence and power, and more to each of us than our experience as victims of violence and power.

From Private Hope to Collective Hope

Collective Hope Spreads

Collective Hope is a shared vision of a desired social change or momentum. When we meet and share our personal hopes, our story is always our own. However, our deep hope sometimes resonates with the hope of others in the group. We respond to the hope in each other. This is mimesis. Sometimes, it inspires us to act together and to do something to bring change into the world..maybe even to conceive and articulate a possible shared social vision. We recognise each other when we recognise our own weakness in the weaknesses of others. Together, we find strength in this act of recognition. The so-called weak and vulnerable are therefore the people who most quickly bring us back to our humanity, and allow us to acknowledge our, often-hidden, own humanity. It is not so much that we ‘help them’ than that they ‘save us’. They save us from the delusion that we will be secure by winning in our rivalries or by being super-human. The vulnerable—abandoned, hungry, isolated, sick, disfigured, discriminated against, climbing mental and physical mountains—call us back to what matters. What once mattered—winning—is set aside as we are restored by not having to win. “Collective hope.. conveys understanding of and commitment to goals and a process of implementation. It is owned by the people rather than being imposed from above, and it gives a sense of meaning and coherence to their livesliv.”

What was once at the margin is put back into the centre. Hope opens a new place from which to see ourselves and others. Because we are free, we can imagine and try to do all sorts of things to respond to each other’s suffering.

• Collective actions together can make hope visible in a way that is unmistakable for the whole community.

• A commitment to work to a shared vision for a street, town, society or even the world, can open opportunities where many people come to share and shape the future collectively.

Hope can grow when a group or a growing body of people sees prospects for real change and are prepared to co-operate to make it a reality. Hope is the source of new opportunities. Living in societies where conflict is very visible and present for everyone, we have learned that sometimes the simple experience of being with different others and sharing hope together effects the whole of life. These experiences cannot be manufactured. These collective moments are important and to be valued in themselves. Places to share our stories are critical if we are to experience hope together. Braithwaite highlights the importance of experiential learning where many ‘private or personal hopes’ are shared, and how these, over time, may develop into wellsprings of ‘collective hopes’. lv Hope, and the experience of living hope together, is critical because even as we return to meet very different and, potentially, strident and opposed points of view, it reminds us of our belonging to one another. Without a base of hope in relationships, everything dissolves back into rivalry. There is a risk, that in our joy at finding hope, we will again rival to pass it on. We race to impose it on others. Amid fear, discord and rivalry the depth and texture of diverse relationships remains shallow and fragile. If we remain rivals, then all our efforts contribute to the on-going rivalry. In rivalry, what was ‘hope’ can quickly become a new weapon with which to destroy others, rather than uplift them. Precisely because hope is learned in failure as well as in success, it is important that we, together, create multiple spaces that keep us grounded with each other. In a time when political structures are failing, finding places where we can find our human belonging to one another is crucial.

Keeping going when there is resistance and push back. Hope is a threat to violence and the very existence of hope undermines violence. Because hope exists ‘outside’ the social order and relies on a conviction that there is more to life than simply violence and power, it is a quiet challenge to every social order. In a world of rivalry, there will always be pushbacks and set-backs. The background of resistance always has to do with power. The resistance may well grow from fear of what change might mean or come from a lack of

experience that there is anything in life except winning. Because hope is not a rival to these push backs, hope allows us to persist, even when things get difficult. Instead of responding in kind, living in hope opens doors, allowing us to perceive alternative routes more clearly when existing routes get blocked. The ‘‘Nurturing Hope’’ resources invite us to explore together, and find our way back to what it might mean, to acknowledge our deep interdependence. From that acknowledgement, we then can contribute to a collective hope developing for a more interdependent and inclusive society. Jin and Kim, in studies of social hope in Korealvi, found that “the collective sense of empowerment or political efficacy, of being able to have one’s voice heard and of having it join others to the point where it makes a difference was strong, and that social hope was higher, for those who had participated in certain types of social activism than it was for those who had not.”

Collective Hope Needs to Be Embedded in Good ‘Institutional Governance’

Individual and small group reflective learning processes are a central element in the gathering of collective hopes. These materials evolved from the practical experiences of the diverse authors and writing partners living, working or volunteering in different societies to promote more open and diverse connections between people who, very easily, could become separate and remain distant. In different societies social, cultural and political dynamics often reinforce distance and separation, avoidance and politeness rather than meeting and taking risks with different others (see Dynamic4- Separation, Avoidance, Politeness and Meeting Together in the strand on Dynamics of Conflict-Affected Societies). Nurturing Hope belongs to the expressions of different people, in diverse societies, and across all ages, meeting and being together in ways that actively:

• build more cross cutting relationships and structures.

• establish and sustain more open civil society cultures.

• produce empirical evidence supporting the value and importance of generating more just and inclusive social and public policies.

In these societies this work supports more open meetings and conversations about how the legacies of historical conflict might be more openly and fundamentally addressed, relationally and structurally. In a major way, it has been, and is, primarily the actions of individuals and groups promoting reconciling actions that has driven this citizen expression. The dynamics of fear and antagonism run deep in many conflict-affected societies. Those nurturing hope at a collective level need to continually face into the strong constraints they face, yet still promote the expression of each citizen’s private hopes for a new, more open and shared society.

Individuals Beginning to Share a Collective Hope!

“When a social group shares a vision and sees prospects for social change, the collective hope process can be said to be working well.”lvii When we share individual hopes with one another, we all reach forward to perceive some possible shared collective vision around the challenges of our society:

• conditions for our children and young people

• opportunities to secure educational qualifications or registrations in trades and professions

• the care of elderly relatives

• fairer rents and public housing provision

• improving community and police relationships

• addressing institutional poverty and racism.

When people exercise their agency through expressing their voices, reflecting on their reasons for living as they do and choosing to live in ways to promote lasting change, they nurture seeds of a collective hope. Such collective energy becomes a powerful mobiliser of energy for the common good. Such collective actions may also nurture a wider shared vision for our public, and even political life, together.

The Governance Culture of Civic Organisations and Public Institutions

The governance structures of civic organisations and public institutions are important as to whether a collective hope is heard and mobilised. Some civic organisations and public institutions are, potentially, trusted spaces in which collective voices can be expressed, places in which citizen voice can be heard and acknowledged. Braithwaite and colleagues examined the culture of various public and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) exploring: Did they contribute to a wider collective hope? Did people’s engagement in and through these organisations and institutions lead them to be hopeful? In our years of practice there is an often unacknowledged culture associated with some civic organisations and public institutions that can be harnessed. They nurture hope when they:

• treat their staff respectfully and attend to the needs of diverse citizens equitably.

• are open to all citizens in the way they work.

• address citizens rightful requests in ways that support their hopes.

When the governance and daily working cultures of public bodies or charitably supported NGOs are future-centred and inclusive, they enable people to remain or become hopeful. Examples illustrating how they can nurture positive responses and spread hope include:

• The Hospital whose reception staff warmly attend to the relatives of all incoming patients.

• The school where staff are interested in individual children and know them by name.

• The civic organisation that insists that all people, irrespective of background, are welcome.

Hope and Civic Culture

With the emergence of more widely shared collective hopes, communities, organisations, public and civic spaces and neighbourhoods will eventually be safer places, absent of threat. When people support a culture of ‘living well together’ and the governance culture of NGOs and public bodies provides spaces for people to meet together, the rules by which people accord respect and work for the common good are agreed, maintained and culturally refreshed. The hope for a sea change between people previously caught up in fear and antagonistic relationships is that in small groups—and eventually in larger civic groups—people sign up to some basic ‘collective hopes’. In more open and co-operative climates, the potential for differing people to engage in more open, robust, and challenging civic discussions signals that more open and diverse communities can be sustained.lviii Our earlier work on equity, diversity and interdependence at the organisational and policy levels illustrated their importance to securing a more open societylvix. The Nurturing Hope group reflection process mirrors this learning and is an invitation for groups of people:

• to meet and build relationships between themselves (interdependence)

• to experience being in a diverse group (diversity)

• to experience different views being expressed without fear of the group breaking apart because relationships have become more important than any sacred beliefs or positions (equity).

If we are to build shared collective hopes in groups of diverse participants, it is the commitment to remain in relationship with different others, whatever our positions, that needs to be fundamentally established and maintained. Such hopes are not just inter- personal priorities but cultural, organisational and societal priorities.

Central to these changes in societal culture are the creation of open and diverse groups:

• where different voices are heard, even when we do not always agree and where people respectfully explore, contest, and share their different hopes and beliefs.

• where people experience, to a new degree, what belonging to an open, respectful and diverse group feels like and what they are eventually capable of doing together.

Nurturing Hope is not geared up to making people winners, securing our individual goals or using our personal agency to get ahead. Rather it is about:

• using the power of individual agency to promote actions that serve the collective good.

• creating relationships that support everyone discerning how the collective good might be promoted.

• sharing, and eventually possibly agreeing on, some collective hopes we all might work towards.

• initiating and, hopefully, undertaking some collective projects together.

Nurturing Hope materials are about supporting our collective engagement with community and societal issues. They are designed to create spaces where we can, together, address what social, political and cultural dynamics might need to be dissolved or promoted so that we might live justly with one another in our differences, rather than individually be indifferent to one another. The materials are not promoting an individualistic theory of hope that is about personal self-advancement or that ignores wider societal responsibilities. They are about whether we can develop experiences through which more collective hopes can be expressed across a diverse population, securing fairer treatment for all those living together in one place. Each one of us lives in societies where social, political and cultural factors play their part in either restricting or opening opportunities for us all to live well together. We are interested in promoting collective approaches by people where we all actively face into the cultural, social and political factors that need attended to if we are to promote hope filled lives, free from fear and distrust, as people living in one shared place. We are not interested in building a theory of hope that denies the fundamental need to secure equal rights and equal citizenship for all. We believe that we currently need to create many diverse learning spaces where people can meet and engage beyond the cultures of outrage and separation or the distance associated with people only speaking with those who share their own sacred beliefs and positions!

Our approach

We need bold civic risks, a groundswell of opinion across the lines of business, civic, faith, interfaith, intercultural, sports and the arts, towards some common goals. Such transcending experiences will nurture openness to diverse people and opinions, the establishment of collective hopes for our common well-being, and new ways to seek and achieve them. In such ways we might begin to surface and map out a whole series of inter-connected ‘collective hopes’ that will serve us, our children and our grandchildren well. Our experience of COVID-19, the challenges of generating a more sustainable world, and being continually reminded that democracy has to be continually worked at, has forced us to recognise how deeply interdependent we are. We self-styled ‘good people’ need to stop separating the world into good and bad, and be open to the embrace of those we have sought to label. We must be open to the transformative journey of nurturing hope together.

Our approach is underpinned by the need to build more open, more socially inclusive societies where diverse citizens together, explore, experience, and sustain spaces and relationships where people, together, agree and disagree, and still find ways forward together.